(versione italiana qua)
The title is inspired by the novel "Le meraviglie del 2000" (= The Wonders of the Year 2000), not exactly among Emilio Salgari's best-known works, which describes the adventures of two friends who sleep for a hundred years and awaken in a future world (in 2003) where electricity is omnipresent, has made communications instantaneous and automated countless work activities. For them, coming from the early 1900s, it's a beautiful and pleasant experience. But then... if you keep reading, you'll understand for yourselves why I chose it as inspiration.
One of the promises tied to the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is that by automating the most repetitive and low-value-added tasks, it would allow workers to have more time for more creative and meaningful activities. Research conducted for eight months, from April to December 2025, at an American tech company of about 200 employees, including through in-depth interviews, partially contradicts this expectation: GenAI tools don't reduce workload, but intensify it. Workers operate at more sustained paces, perform a broader range of tasks, and extend their activity to time slots that were previously reserved for rest, often without anyone explicitly asking them to.
Three main forms of intensification have been identified.
The first is task expansion: since with GenAI one can easily access professional skills that one doesn't possess, workers have begun to tackle tasks that were previously performed by others. Product managers and designers started writing code, researchers took on product development activities, and generally employees attempted work they would have previously delegated or avoided. GenAI tools made these tasks suddenly accessible, making possible what many experienced as cognitive enhancement: less dependence on others, immediate feedback, sense of autonomy. The concrete result was a progressive widening of each role's perimeter, with cascading effects: engineers, for example, found themselves having to review and correct GenAI-assisted work produced by colleagues, with a further increase in their own workload.
The second form of intensification described in the research was the progressive blurring of the boundary between work and non-work. Since starting a task with GenAI became almost frictionless — no more "writer's block" — workers began inserting small work activities into moments that were previously for waiting: during lunch, in meetings, while waiting for a file to load. The conversational style of prompts contributed to normalizing this behavior, making it difficult to perceive the activity as "real work." Over time, breaks lost their recovery function and work took on an increasingly widespread and continuous presence throughout the day.
The third form is intensified multi-tasking: GenAI introduced a new work mode where a person simultaneously performs multiple activities — writing code manually while GenAI generates an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, resuming long-postponed activities because GenAI can "handle them" in the background. While this creates a sensation of productive momentum, it also causes continuous attention shifting, frequent checking of what GenAI is doing, and a growing number of open activities to follow.
These three mechanisms feed each other in a self-reinforcing cycle: GenAI accelerates certain tasks, speed expectations increase, dependence on GenAI grows, the work perimeter expands further.
The authors warn that what appears to be a productivity gain risks masking a silent and unsustainable expansion of workload, with consequences for cognitive fatigue, decision quality, turnover and burnout. Since the additional effort is voluntary and often experienced as stimulating experimentation, managers struggle to notice it until the damage is already done.
At this point I pick up the threads of Salgari's novel: what happens to the two young men is that the frenetic pace and continuous stimuli caused by the acceleration of human activities induced by electricity lead to irritability, insomnia, mental fatigue, culminating in a real nervous breakdown. What seemed like an unstoppable possibility for progress reveals itself as a physiological and psychological threat. The moral, extraordinarily current, is that technological progress, if not accompanied by balancing actions that take our human nature into account, can become destructive.
We must be well aware of this aspect as generative artificial intelligence tools (useful, but to be used with constant attention) become increasingly widespread. Surely psychologists who deal with digital transformation will be able to contribute to deepening these aspects.
The solution proposed by the authors of the study I cited is not to ask individuals to self-regulate, but to develop a real "corporate GenAI practice": a set of intentional norms and routines that structure the use of these tools. The authors suggest three concrete levers: intentional pauses to slow the pace and prevent silent accumulation of overload; work sequencing, namely norms that regulate when and how activities advance, protecting concentration windows and reducing context switching that is costly from a cognitive standpoint; finally, human grounding, namely the protection of spaces and moments of social connection that interrupt solitary work mediated by GenAI, broaden perspective and feed creativity through comparison between different human viewpoints.
These are practices that become increasingly important as informatics technology becomes more widespread. Despite beginning to talk about techno-stress in the mid-1980s and some countermeasures being taken, e.g. at least in some organizations email is not accessible outside work hours, we are — thanks to smartphones and social networks — constantly connected.
Let's be careful that the further acceleration due to generative artificial intelligence doesn't derail our mental health. What do you think?
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "StartMAG" on 11 April 2026.
